QuoteReplyTopic: Six cities in three weeks – a SIEGE story Posted: 27 May 2015 at 15:13

Please allow me to make two points from the very beginning. First, alts are not new characters, so new players need not feel any lack of efficiency from having used settlers. Second, this was not done as a dedicated example of either speed or efficiency. I did it because it worked with my other plans at the time, and only decided this morning that others might benefit from hearing of what I had done.

I believe siege leading to faster growth than settling is common knowledge. Not being held down by waiting for research is huge. But doing it from the very beginning has a much larger impact than some may have thought about. The common advice to not hinder your growth by having troops early on may have lead to a general attitude that Barracks and the whole military research tree were for "later"...

I did use prestige. Not a ton, less than 100, and again I was not trying for efficiency. So with the free 25 you start with, and a single prestige scrap, the results could easily be repeated. I have no doubt it could be done for less if someone was focused on that rather than ease.

I created a new character. Dwarf, though not for any reason except that I hadn’t played a dwarf before. Following the same basic method I had for a dozen terraforms in the past, I ignored resource plots, leveled the storehouse, and sent books and basic resources from my other towns.

The primary divergence happened once I had the Inventory Management research completed and got a few levels of the warehouse built. Rather than beginning to work on high population buildings, I went straight to work on the Barracks. That is where the critical portions of prestige were used. A level 20 barracks is necessary for the Siege Encampment research, and the research takes 4 days, so getting it started quickly is imperative to the plan. I finished the Barracks on day 3, and the Siege Encampment research on day 9.

Commanders and troops were ready. As soon as Siege Encampment was done, I sent 3 (non siege engine) sieges out. For my purposes, there was a sitter in place who de-leveled the cities once my sieges were setup. For others who are trying to run a similar speed of growth, having a friend or other character who can send siege engines is the workaround (they knock the population down with siege engines, your siege army captures). Otherwise you need to spend another several days on War Machines and building your own siege engines, which slows the plan considerably, but is still much, much faster than settlers.

I don’t recall if I was already at 450 pop when I sent the sieges out, but I was by the time they landed. A 19k pop town was knocked down, and upon capturing, I suddenly had sufficient population for cities 3 and 4. Two more similarly sized cities were captured, and there I am at 4 cities and about 14k population. The 3rd city was close to the remaining targets, so I built 4 T1 cavalry, two commanders and two troops, and sent two more sieges out. It took just over a day for the sitter to delevel each town, and there were some hiccups, but on day 21 I captured city 6, and was at about 26k population.

More efficiency could be accomplished by having the initial newb city razed. It’s only about 1500 pop right now (one month old today), and trading that for another city in the 20k starting pop range would be enough to bump me over 30k pop, as well as avoiding doing any more research in that initial city.

Up until the 6th city, every city captured ensured *immediately* that I had sufficient population to capture the following city. No effort in building up population was required. A 7th would have been relatively little work, except my alt was destined for BL, so after capturing the 6th I started Exodus.

Although I might have made different building choices if I was using settlers, I would probably just be considering city 3 at this point, rather than having 6 developed and useful cities.

Notes:

Don’t start de-leveling a building until the 12 hour siege setup is complete. We ruined one that way.

You can’t hit the capture button for two cities at the same time. You have to wait for one capture to complete before you can start the next.

Anyone with a supportive alliance should be able to accomplish similar results. An alliance can send res, provide targets, use outside siege armies, probably even provide prestige scraps.

Settling even one town screws up the time table, but sieging will still be faster than settling future towns. Starting to siege on town 3 provides the opportunity to go straight to 5 still.

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